Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

"How was your day?" she said. She stood at the top of the stairs, in the door to the kitchen, holding a pot.

  He stood below, on the landing, one hand in the pocket of his rain-slick jacket, the other grasping the leather briefcase she had given him for Christmas last year. "Fine," he said.

  That was what he always said. The conversation was as ritualized as some ancient religious ceremony. And so she said, "What did you do today?"

  "Nothing."

  That was fine, too, that was a formula. She turned away. She didn't care what he'd done all day any more than he cared what she'd done. She didn't care about flow charts and tax law and office politics any more than he cared about her garden or her classes or any of the hundred things she did to fill the empty days. That was how it was - even though the rain had begun to erase the world they had known, to sweep away without discrimination the tax laws and the flow charts, and the gardens and art classes, too.

  But that night - the forty-eighth night of a rain that would never end -that night was different. In the kitchen, as she placed the pot on the stove, she heard his footsteps squeak across the linoleum. He was behind her. She smelled his cologne, weak beneath the moist earthwormy stench of the rain. She turned and he was standing there, a droplet of rain poised at the end of his nose. Rain dripped off his slicker and pooled on the linoleum floor. Rain flattened his hair against his skull.

  "Stuart?" she said.

  The briefcase slipped from his fingers. Rain glistened on his cheeks and in his eyes. The other hand came out of his pocket, extending towards her.

  Toadstools, pale and spongy against his pale and spongy flesh, as colorless as the pasty skin of some cave-dwelling amphibian, extruded from his fist. Toadstools, spotted and poisonous, dangled from between his fingers.

  "Toadstools are growing in the yard," he said.

  "I know."

  "We have to get to higher ground."

  "It won't be any different there," she said. She had a vision of the mountain cabin, three rooms, and all about them the entombing rain.

  "It's raining all around the world," she said.

  He turned away. The toadstools dropped from his fingers as he left the room. Melissa stared at the fungoid stalks, cold and colorless as dead flesh against the linoleum. She shuddered when she picked them up.

  And so this morning, on the forty-ninth morning, they had fled at last. The highways were virtually abandoned; occasionally four-wheel drives zipped past, flying harried in either direction, driven by panicked, pasty-looking men. In fields to either side of the road, lakes, ponds, seas swelled and grew. Mushrooms sprouted at the horizon, overshadowing the trees; on hilly slopes they saw houses and barns decaying beneath masses of putrid mold. Three times the pavement had disappeared before them, submerged; three times Stuart had dropped the Jeep into four-wheel drive and edged forward, fearing sinkholes and washouts; three times their luck had held and they had emerged to wet pavement once again.

  They fled east, up 81 to 77, north into West Virginia and the Appalachians. They had a cabin there, near a ski resort in Raleigh County. Melissa remembered when they had bought it a year ago. When Stuart had bought it; he hadn't consulted her. He had come home late one day, clutching the papers, his eyes wild and feverish. "I used the money," he had announced, "I made a down-payment on a cabin and two acres of woodland." Something cold and hateful pierced her then. Stuart had spent the money, the baby's money, and the spending came like the icy needle-probe of reality:

  There was no baby. There would not ever be one.

  Now, on the forty-ninth day, they fled northward into night, seeking higher ground, but the rain stayed with them, omnipresent and eternal. It fell out of the sky in solid sheets, flowing over the black pavement and soaking Stuart when he pulled over to refill the tank from the gas cans strapped in the back of the Jeep. Cursing, he would climb back inside and crank the heat to its highest setting, and each time Melissa would remember her long-ago fantasy of making love in the rain. She took a last drag from the cigarette and let the wind have it, watching in the mirror as it tumbled away, extinguished by the rain.

  Sodium lights appeared, lining the highway. Ahead, a mountain loomed dark against the gray sky. The road rose to meet it, rose, and rose, and plunged down toward a granite wall. A tunnel -the second one since Wytheville -opened up before them at the last moment, and Melissa clenched her fists, fearing washouts, fearing cave-ins. Then they were inside, the sound of the rain disappearing as they crossed under the mountain and into West Virginia.

  Bars of shadow and light flashed across Stuart's face and the hum of tires against dry pavement filled the car. The wipers scraped against the dry windshield, back and forth, back and forth, and then they emerged from the tunnel into a shifting wall of rain.

  "Christ," Stuart said. "Do you think it'll ever stop? Do you think it'll rain forever?"

  She looked away, out the window, into the falling rain, and that rag of nursery rhyme returned to her. "Rain, rain go away," she said. "Come again some other day."

  Night closed in around them. Mountains rose above the road like the shoulders of giants, black against the black sky. Melissa smoked her last cigarette. Far ahead, huddled high against an arm of the ridge, Melissa saw a sprinkle of lights, all that remained of a once-bustling town. The cabin lay farther north, isolated still higher in the mountains. Three rooms, Stuart, and all about them the besieging rain.

  At last, the lights came up around them.

  "Would you look at that?" Stuart said, pointing.

  She saw it then, as well, a blazing Texaco sign towering above the highway. Beyond it stretched a strip of hotels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants - most of them dark, abandoned.

  "It could be a trap," Stuart said, "to lure in the unwary."

  She sighed.

  "We should have bought that gun."

  "No guns," she said.

  "We'll have to risk it. If they have gas, we could top off the tank, refill our cans. Maybe they'll have kerosene."

  Without another word, he exited to the strip, passed the boarded-up ruins of fast-food restaurants and hotels, and stopped the Jeep beneath the canopy by the Texaco's islands. She watched as he studied the parking lot suspiciously; he put her in mind of some frightened forest creature, and she had the disquieting thought that men weren't so far removed from the jungle. Satisfied at last, he killed the engine; the noise of the rain grew louder, almost deafening, drowning out her thoughts. She opened the door and stood, stretching.

  "I'm going to the restroom," she said, without turning; she heard the pump come on, gasoline gush into the tank.

  "You want anything from inside?" he asked.

  "Get me a coke and a pack of cigarettes."

  The bathrooms were across the parking lot, through the downpour. Melissa shrugged on her raincoat, slipped the hood over her head, and darted across the pavement, one arm cocked ineffectually above her, warding off the rain. The interior of the restroom stank of urine and bleach; mold had begun to blossom here, sodden, cancerous roses along the base of the dry-wall. A trash can overflowed in one corner. Melissa's nose wrinkled in disgust as she covered the toilet seat with toilet paper.

  When she returned, Stuart was waiting in the Jeep.

  "Can you believe it," he said. "He took money, good old-fashioned American money. Fool."

  "You get my stuff?"

  He gestured at the dash. A can of Diet Coke waited there, sweating condensation.

  "What about my cigarettes?"

  "I didn't get them. We have to be careful now. Who knows when we'll be able to see a doctor again?"

  "Jesus, Stuart." Melissa got out and slammed the door. She walked to the tiny shop. The attendant sat behind the register, his feet propped against the counter, reading a novel which he placed face-down when the door chimed behind her.

  "What can I do for you?" he said.

  "Pack of Marlboro Lights, please."

  He shook his head as he pulled the cigarettes from an ove
rhead rack. "Shouldn't smoke, lady. Bad for you."

  "I've given up sun-bathing to compensate."

  The attendant laughed.

  She looked up at him, a young man, not handsome, with flesh the color and texture of the toadstools she had scraped off the kitchen floor. Flesh like Stuart's flesh, in the midst of that subtle change of his.

  But nice eyes, she decided. Clear eyes, blue, the color of water. Eyes like the baby might have had. And this thought moved her to say something -anything, just to make contact. "Think it'll ever stop raining?"

  "Who knows? Maybe it's a good thing. Cleansing."

  "You think?"

  "Who knows? Wash the whole world away, we'll start again. Rain's okay by me."

  "Me, too," she said, and now she thought again of the fragment of radio program. Is God out there? the host had wanted to know. And is He angry?

  She is, the woman had replied. She is.

  Melissa's hand stole over her belly, where the baby, her baby, had grown and died. Abruptly, the crazed logic of the idea, its simple clarity and beauty, seized her up: this was the world they had made, she thought, men like Stuart, this world of machines and noise, this world of simple tasteless things. This is the world that is being washed away. Their world.

  Outside, Stuart began to blow the horn. The sound came to her, discordant, importunate. Melissa glanced out at the Jeep, at Stuart, impatient behind the steering wheel, anxious to be off, anxious to get to higher ground. Three rooms in the mountains, just three. She and Stuart and all about them the imprisoning rain. It fell still, beyond the roof over the fuel islands, blowing out of the sky in sheets, dancing against the pavement, chasing neon reflections of the Texaco sign across black puddles.

  "Lady? You okay? Miss?"

  "Missus," she said, out of habit. She turned to face him.

  "You okay?"

  "I'm fine, just distracted that's all."

  The horn blew again.

  "Nice guy."

  "Not really. He tries to be, sometimes."

  The horn again. Impatiently.

  "You better go."

  "Yeah." She dug in her purse for money.

  "Forget it. Like it means anything now, right?"

  She hesitated. "Thanks, then."

  "You're welcome. Be careful. Who knows what the roads are like in the mountains."

  She nodded and stepped out into moist air. Stuart had gotten out of the Jeep. He stood by the open door, his flesh orange and spongy beneath the streetlights, his arms crossed against his chest. He stared at her impatiently, beyond him only darkness, only rain. Water fell from the night sky, against the gleaming pavement, the buildings, the shining neon Texaco sign. Against everything, washing it all away.

  "Hurry up," Stuart said.

  And she said, without even realizing she was going to say it, "I'm not coming. You go ahead." When she said it, she was suffused suddenly with warmth and excitement and life, a sensation of release, as if a hard knot of emotion, drawn tight in her chest through long years, had suddenly loosened.

  "What?" Stuart said. "What are you talking about?"

  Melissa didn't answer. She walked past Stuart and the Jeep, stopping at the edge of the canopy that sheltered the fuel islands. She shrugged out of the raincoat, let it drop to the pavement behind her. Ignoring Stuart, she lined up the tips of her toes against the hard clear edge of the pavement where it was wet, where the roof left off and the rain began.

  Stuart said, "Melissa? Melissa?"

  But Melissa didn't answer. She stepped out into a world that was ending, into a gently falling rain. It poured down over her, cool and refreshing against her cheeks and lips and hair, caressing her with the hands of a lover.

  THE FLOOD

  Linda Nagata

  Linda Nagata lives in Hawaii where she is currently a programmer of online database applications. She produced a loosely connected series of novels developing concepts of nanotechnology of which The Bohr Maker (1995) won the Locus Award as that year's best first novel. The following enigmatic story, published in 1998, has haunted me since I first read it. It contains several compelling images that cloak the horrors of a global deluge into a mystical allegory.

  * * *

  MIKE LAY AWAKE in the night on a bed of damp leaves in the towering shelter of a eucalyptus grove, listening to the pounding surf. His young wife Holly slept on the ground beside him, clutching their thin blanket to her chin, her legs half-tangled with his. He rested his hand lightly on her rib cage, feeling her breathe.

  Nights were the worst. At night he couldn't see the waters coming. So he listened to the surf, trying to measure the volume of the ocean by the sound. He'd seen the ocean rise as much as thirty meters in a night. Rising. Never receding.

  Fear slipped like oil across his skin -cold, encompassing fear. Through his mind's eye he watched Holly drowning, her face pale and exhausted as she finally slipped beneath the relentless waters. Still, that sort of death was ancient and familiar.

  God, God, God.

  Sudden sweat coated his body despite the chill of the night. His stomach seemed to fold into a fist. This, he thought, would be a good time to recall some profound and comforting passage from the Bible. But he didn't know any. Religion had never been his thing.

  Still, God was ever in his thoughts these days, as he watched the world drown.

  How could He let this happen?

  Mike did not believe in the beneficence of God. He was not even sure he believed in the deity Himself. And alone amongst the survivors, he refused to accept that the end of the world might be a good thing.

  Sometime before dawn the rising waters must have claimed a gentler shoreline, because the noise of the surf subsided. Mike slept then, waking only when the sun was well up. He cuddled against Holly on their bed of leaves, gazing downslope at the ocean. He could see it just beyond the grove of trees. Its surface was glassy in the crisp, still air of morning, the waters pale green over a pasture that had flooded in the night. Gentle swells rolled in from the deep to sweep upslope through the eucalyptus grove in flat hissing crescents.

  Mike watched them in a half-conscious state, pleasantly distanced from both his worrisome dreams and untenable reality, until a slight breeze rustled through the tree tops, reminding him that he still needed to devise a sail for his newly finished boat.

  Holly stirred sleepily. He bent over her, gently brushing aside her long dark hair to kiss her cheek, feeling yet again the sour clench of fear. He would not let her be taken. He could not. It would be better to drown. But better still to steal her away on his boat. Soon. Maybe even today.

  She blinked and stretched, then smiled at him, a serene joy glowing in her dark eyes. "Mike. Do you feel it, Mike? It's very close now."

  "We don't have any food left," he told her.

  She shrugged, sitting up, her long tanned legs goose-bumped in the morning chill. "We don't need any food. Today will be the last day. I can feel it."

  As if to emphasize her words another wave slid up through the grove to swish against her feet, laying down a crescent of sand before subsiding. Mike found himself staring at the dread signature. In the weeks since the flood began, he'd watched the sand and waves take over roads, houses, forests, pastures, farms, as the ocean steadily rose, drowning the island that had always been their home.

  They'd retreated upslope as the waters advanced, but the highest point on the island had been only 500 meters above sea level.

  Mike squinted down at the new shoreline. Now, he guessed the highest point might clear thirty meters. He frowned, trying to recall the exact geography of the island before the flood. Hadn't the meadow where he'd built his boat been more than thirty meters below the summit?

  "The ark!" he yelped, leaping to his feet. "Holly ... " He grabbed her hand and yanked her up. The roar of the night's surf resounded in his mind. His boat had been well above the waterline at nightfall, but now—

  He ran through the grove, dragging Holly with him. He was afraid to leav
e her alone, afraid she would disappear like so many others.

  "Mike," she panted, bounding along in his rough wake. "It's all right, Mike. You don't need the boat. Everything will be all right."

  But he couldn't believe her. He'd never been able to believe.

  They splashed through a retreating wave, through rotten leaves half-buried in sand. Their feet sank deep into the unstable mix. Tiny air bubbles erupted on the forming beach. Then they reached the edge of the grove and burst into the open.

  Sunlight sparkled on green water. Children frolicked in the swell, riding the shore break at the edge of the insatiable ocean.

  Finally letting go of Holly's hand, Mike scrambled up a scrub-covered ridge of ancient lava. By the time he reached the top, the cool air was tearing in and out of his lungs. He stood on the crest and looked down at his project.

  Yesterday evening, the boat had rested solidly on its platform, fifteen meters above the waterline and nearly completed, a tiny ark made of green eucalyptus wood. But the surf had seized it in the night, throwing it against the jagged lava of the ridge. The shattered pieces bobbed and tumbled with the incoming waves.

  Holly joined him, her breast heaving with exertion beneath the scanty coverage of her tank top. She glanced at the wreckage, hardly seeing it. "Come and swim, Mike," she pleaded. Her eyes were wide and soft. "The water's warm. The waves aren't big. It's a perfect day. A gift from God."

  On the summit of the island a huge white wooden cross glowed in the morning light, a memory of earlier days.

  Most of the people who'd lived on the island before the flood had already been taken away. There were only forty or fifty left, waiting patiently for their turn on the ropes.

  Mike tore his gaze away from the shattered boat, and rounded on Holly. "Wake up!" he shouted. "Wake up. You've been walking around in a daze for weeks. You and everyone else while an act of genocide has been going on around you. We're dying, Holly. Family by family, your god is killing us."

  Holly's gaze seemed suddenly weighted in concern. She raised her hand to brush Mike's wild hair away from his face, off his ears, as if by that simple measure she hoped to change a basic deficiency in his vision, in his hearing.